Veteran War Reporter Martha Gellhorn, 89

February 17, 1998|By From Tribune News Services.

LONDON — American writer and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, who reported conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam to Panama and was the third wife of Ernest Hemingway, died Monday, her family said. She was 89.

Stepson Sandy Matthews said she died in her London home.

Ms. Gellhorn, who had been a heavy smoker, had suffered from cancer.

"She had been quite ill for some time, but her mind was sharp to the end. I had dinner with her a few weeks ago," said journalist Marie Colvin, a close friend.

Ms. Gellhorn, who wrote 13 novels of her own, resented being most famous as a Hemingway wife. "I was a writer before I met him and I have been a writer for 45 years since," she once complained. "Why should I be a footnote to someone else's life?"

She was born in St. Louis and lived in Britain for many years, maintaining an apartment in London and a country house in Wales.

She graduated from Bryn Mawr College before launching a reporting career that spanned several decades. She wrote for a variety of publications, including Collier's Weekly--for which she covered the Spanish Civil War--and The Atlantic Monthly, which dispatched her to report the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

The Guardian of London sent her to cover the conflict in Vietnam in 1966 and the war in Israel the next year.

She also reported from the front in World War II, the Java conflict and the Sino-Japanese War.

She continued working until her late 70s, when she lost part of her sight through a "botched" cataract operation and could not use the manual typewriter she had always worked on.

She had no time "for all that objectivity (stuff)," she said in a recent interview. The reporter's job, she said, was "to limit yourself to what you see or hear and not suppress or invent."

As a reporter, she concentrated on the tragedy of ordinary people caught up in wars not of their making.

She was present at the Allies' D-Day landings in Normandy and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau outside Munich at the end of World War II.

"But she was most proud of her novels," Matthews said, "and frustrated when they did not sell," even though they were critically acclaimed.

They included "The Trouble I've Seen" (1936), "A Stricken Field" (1939), "The Heart of Another" (1940), "The Honeyed Peace" (1953) and "Two by Two" (1958).

In later life, she wrote occasional pieces for British newspapers, usually travel articles or book reviews.

She met Hemingway in Florida in 1936 at the famous Sloppy Joe's bar in Key West.

She and Hemingway become lovers in Madrid in 1937 while she was on her first major assignment, covering the Spanish Civil War.

The couple married in 1940, but five years later, Ms. Gellhorn called an end to the relationship while they were staying at London's Dorchester Hotel.

In 1953, she married Time magazine editor Thomas Matthews. They divorced in the early 1960s.

Ms. Gellhorn had little use for most war reporting after the Vietnam War, saying that the press' role in ending that conflict had taught military leaders a lesson.

"They realized the power of the press and have been controlling it ever since," she said. "Look at the (Persian) Gulf war. If you wanted to go out and say to a soldier, `How is it, kid?' you had to bring a minder so the kid says nothing.

"It seems to me that they feed war reporters at these ridiculous briefings in the ballrooms of hotels miles from anywhere. I think we have to educate the reading public to realize that they are getting crap."

She is survived by an adopted son, Sandy Gellhorn, and her brother, Alfred.